Weighted rotator table design - mysql

Question

I am having a hard time with this very simple project. Maybe it's because it's Monday, I'm not sure.
I have a table that looks like this:
id | weight | hits
------------------------------------------------
1 | 4 | 0
2 | 1 | 0
3 | 2 | 0
Obviously, the hits column will increment by 1 each time that particular record is selected (We will run this update from within our PHP script).
How can I best retrieve these records by their weight? What I mean is that if I ran my query 15 times, I would want the following IDs returned:
1
1
1
1
3
3
2
1
1
1
1
3
3
2
1
We have a simple formula in place that we got online that retrieves a random weighted result, but we aren't running the formula enough to statistically balance out the results, so instead we need to do a simple rotation as described above.
I know that this is a simple problem to solve, but I'm having a hard time coming up with the best way to do it today.
I hope I've been clear enough in my description of the problem.

Answer 1

Unless I'm missing something (it is Monday here too after all), can't you just sort by hits / weight and LIMIT 1?

Answer 2

Run:
SELECT id FROM tbl WHERE weight - hits > 0 ORDER BY weight DESC LIMIT 0,1
With the last result, run:
UPDATE tbl SET hits = hits + 1, total_hits = total_hits + 1 WHERE id = (THE RESULT);
Then run
SELECT (Sum(weight-hits)) FROM tbl
If result = 0
UPDATE tbl SET hits = 0
EDIT:
It's possible to make it with two queries:
$query="SELECT id FROM tbl, weight - hits AS diff WHERE weight - hits > 0 ORDER BY weight DESC";
$result=mysql_query($query);
$num=mysql_numrows($result);
$i=0;
$id=mysql_result($result,$i,"id");
$diff =0;
while ($i < $num) {
$diff= $diff + mysql_result($result,$i,"diff");
++$i;
}
if( $diff = 1 and $i = 1);
$query2="UPDATE tbl SET hits = 0, total_hits = total_hits + IF(id='$id',1,0)";
else{
$query2="UPDATE tbl SET hits = hits + 1, total_hits = total_hits + 1 WHERE id = '$id'";
}
mysql_query($query2);